Newenee: The Shoshonean Peoples of Southern Idaho

In fall 2021, Hagerman Fossil Beds National Monument in Idaho added new wayside exhibits at its Snake River and Oregon Trail overlooks, covering both the site's fossils and the human history of the Snake River Plain. The National Park Service worked with representatives of the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes to write one of them, Newenee: The People, illustrated with artwork made for the monument by the Shoshone-Bannock artist Derek No-Sun Brown. Signs at two trailheads carry a welcome from the tribes and the names of some local plants and animals in the Shoshone and Bannock languages.

A welcome from the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes

The tribes' welcome describes a homeland of the Shoshone, Bannock and Paiute peoples stretching across Idaho's valleys, rivers, streams, steppes, lava fields, deserts and mountains — from the highest peaks to the deepest canyons, and past any state line — lands and waters they hold sacred. These once supported countless salmon and the people themselves, the Newenee, their word for "the people." Speakers of the Shoshone, Bannock and Paiute languages may also be called Shoshonean.

Only a few generations ago, many of their ancestors lived around Hagerman on the Bia Ogwaide — "big river" in Shoshone, the Snake River. They were forced out, settled on reservations and made to adapt to other ways of life. But, the welcome says, their history and their ties to their original lands did not end there; they continue today, and now include visitors, whom the tribes invite to join in appreciating and protecting these lands for the future.

Newenee: the people

Newenee is a Shoshonean plural meaning "human beings" or "the people."

The view over the Snake River has been transformed by modern life, but the river, the land and the fossils have drawn the Newenee's attention for thousands of years, back to time immemorial. The ancestors of the Shoshonean people were just as amazed by the ancient animals' bones coming out of the ground as visitors are today, and many Shoshonean stories, from folklore to oral history, are tied to this area because it was used for so long and mattered so much.

Before dams were built on the Columbia and Snake rivers, the Snake's great salmon runs, which ran up to the natural barrier of Shoshone Falls, drew people here. The area lies at the center of the vast seasonal subsistence cycles that Shoshone and Bannock peoples lived by for millennia. The whole landscape is home, and nature provides the plants, animals and everything else life needs, as long as those gifts are cared for and respected.

A tribal elder, quoted in Deward Walker's 2015 cultural landscapes study, explained that people go back to their traditional homes and lands to renew themselves, and mostly to teach their children about the ancestors buried throughout them — a way of life, the elder said, handed down from ancient times.

Sources

Rewritten from the National Park Service article "Newenee: The Shoshonean Peoples of Southern Idaho" (Hagerman Fossil Beds National Monument), in hubnx's own words. The exhibit text was written with the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes, and the tribes' welcome and the elder's words are paraphrased rather than quoted. Derek No-Sun Brown's painting Summer Stories, and the photograph of the panel showing it, are not reproduced.

• Words on this page from people and organisations outside the federal government are paraphrased; rewritten in hubnx's own words.